Poetry in process (seeking feedback) by Stephen S. Morse, one of the best known of the Oakland California "beat poets" still alive and writing poetry today. Shape poetry anthologies of the future with your critique. Includes work from the 70's, 80's, 90's, and the 21st century. First published in The Saturday Review. Influences include Charles Simic, Robert Creeley, George Cuomo, John Ciardi,Thom Gunn, William Carlos Williams, William Blake, Charles Olson, Carl Jung, Shakespeare, and even a little Robert Frost of late.

Born in 1945, January to be exact, in Oakland Naval Hospital, Morse was an anomaly already. Too old to be one of the hippy boomers. Too young to chum with Ginsberg, Ferlenghetti, Hirschman, Kerouac, et al. But old enough to hang out at Coffee and Confusion in North Beach during the early 60's. and go to some of the same parties as Ginsberg and cronies in the early seventies . . . Stephen was already a poet at that point, enabled by "the older San Francisco beats" to write any way he wanted, published in The Saturday Review, an Anthology of College Writers, a lot of small mags, and independent and arrogant enough to think they ( the North Beach Clan) were yesterday's news. . . more in to talk than poetry. A major influence and cosmic gossip,Bob Creeley, was an instructor at San Francisco State in the 70's, and met off campus with Morse and others to talk about poetry and writing poetry. Mostly Creeley gossiped with his buddies about the various foibles of the San Francisco poets. Man knew damn near everyone and loved to talk about people. Creeley had only one eye and rumor had it that he'd lost it in a bar brawl...he was apparently fond of getting drunk in blue collar bars and antagonizing his way in to a fight. At the time Morse lived in a part of Oakland dubbed "baja piedmont" because of it's downslope proximity to the old-money city of Piedmont where his patrons,Jim and Carol McCandless, lived. Experimentation was and is a hallmark of Morse's poetry. Don Stanley, a critic for the San Francisco Examiner, once wrote in annoyance about Morse's work, that "Morse writes like one of those self-proclaimed geniuses . . . always trying things just to see what happens." Morse was pleased by Stanley's annoyance. That is another trademark of Stephen's writing. He has said about his own work that," I write to see what effect I have, and I am secretly more pleased by irritation than approval. One of the roles of the Artist is to create confusion out of self-conscious order. People who know what they're talking about always make me nervous." If you're looking for the whitmanesque long lines of Ginsberg and crowd, and their penchant for obscure literary allusions, you aren't going to find it in Morse's work. "He's mystical." Not in your Eastern sense of the word. . . it's more chaotic and arbitrary. Like his recent sonnets, fabricated out of arbitrary end rime selection by students in writing classes . . .slices of the moment ( Carl Jung dubbed the concept, "synchronicity" ) that dictate their own reality. "More voodoo than anything else," Morse says,"the moment here is a slice of everywhere's 'then'. The self-conscious selection of theme always seems to be a lie. Blake knew that. He and his wife saw it in the coals of their fire..." Morse says, "Writer's are good in spite of what they think they know about writing, not because of what they think they know. You can't think your way to creating Art, although paradoxically enough you have to know your craft. Ultimately rules are for CPA's and Critics. They're meant to be learned and broken whenever I feel like it." email Morse if you have any comments or questions about the other influences on his work or anything else. Depending on his mood, he may even answer. Lew Spaulding